My partner and I recently got out her old Xbox 360 and as a birthday present I thought I would either get the Xbox running again or pull her Skyrim saves off of it to play on PC.

We had the Xbox Red Ring of Death'ing (RROD) a few months ago so I expected that the Xbox would have to be disassembled to be fixed. In the interim it seems laying the Xbox down in stead of vertical stops it RRODing but it still doesn't read discs. Before tearing into it I decided to copy all the saves on her xbox to a flash drive (easily formatted by plugging into the 360 while at the dashboard) and figure out how to get her latest Skyrim save to work on an updated PC version of Skyrim.

I found this quite old (8 years as of this writing) Reddit post that has a procedure to run through to get the saves onto your PC. Unfortunately, the tools mentioned are not supported anymore and are rather sketchy (especially Horizon, which makes you turn off all antivirus and run as admin). On Windows 10 64-bit, Horizon throws an intriguing error and displays a log from failed registry problems:

I looked into this for about 30 mins and then gave up.

Modio

Modio, on the other hand, does install but throws different errors due to the Modio servers not running anymore.

Modio after being frozen for about a minute looking for it's server

This is how I was able to extract game saves (not ready for Skyrim PC consumption) using Modio:

  • Having the Xbox 360 flashdrive plugged in
  • Launch Modio and wait for the 'Couldn't load the news feed' main page
  • Clicking on the 'Open a Save' tab on the bottom
  • Click on USB Stick
  • Click on Skyrim and find the save you want to save

If you are unlucky like me, you will get an error and be unable to extract the inner save file necessary to pull the save information into Skyrim PC. If your Modio was willing, jump down to Moving Extracted Save to Skyrim folders otherwise continue

  • Click "Explore Device"
  • Expand Folders down to Gamesaves. Will look frozen for a while if there are many saves present
  • Right click on the save you want to pull out and select "Save As"
  • Save the file somewhere, should default to *.exs file suffix

This next part was quite annoying to find and involved at looking at the save game hex data and comparing it to my old Skyrim saves. This unofficial Elder Scrolls mod page mentions an alternative tool to extract the save game data out of the Xbox 360 save file. The tool is wxPirs, and it is thankfully much more straightforward than Horizon or Modio.

  • Click on the folder and select your recently extracted *.exs file
  • Right click on "Savegame.dat" and extract file

Moving Extracted Save to Skyrim folders

  • Now that you have a "Savegame.dat" file, move/copy it to where your Skyrim game saves are (Typically Documents/my games/skyrim/saves)
  • Rename Savegame.dat to include *.ess file suffix and tell Windows that yes you want to change file type
  • Fire up Skyrim
  • Locate your newly named and loaded save file. The picture will likely look quite funny but should load anyway
  • Enjoy!

Notes:

Thankfully I had a 'vanilla' or non-special edition of Skyrim on PC, so the normal Skyrim on Xbox 360 had no compatibility issues. From a quick investigation online there might be issues going between normal and special editions